Berkeley, California - July 27, 2005 - Vela Design Group announces VelaClock 1.1. This is a free update for VelaClock 1.0 customers. VelaClock is a world clock Dashboard widget that is much more than a clock! Besides the local time in 12 or 24 hour format, VelaClock displays the current level of natural light (daylight, three levels of twilight, or night), an image of the moon, and the national flag. Basic data can be displayed for up to twenty-four cities simultaneously. Users can choose from almost 500 cities in over 200 countries.

The lower pane displays detailed information about the currently selected city. There are three different views, accessible through tabs:
1) A bar that gives the user a picture of the 24 hours of natural light (bright daylight, civil twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight and night) for the current day. The duration of daylight is specified in hours and minutes.
2) An image of the moon as seen in the sky above the currently selected city. This image accurately depicts the angle of the moon's crescent. Because this angle can change dramatically within the span of an hour, it is updated once a minute, as is the moon's phase. This view also contains the name of the current phase, as well as local times for the next and previous phase events (new, quarter, full).
3) An analog clock and time zone information. The relative time shows the number of hours the selected city is ahead or behind the current time zone, as set in System Preferences.

VelaClock is a unique widget in that it is completely self-contained. Many widgets are light weight front-ends to web services; such widgets require an internet connection. By contrast, VelaClock is designed to function without an internet connection, and so is particularly useful for laptop users away from their home or office. Astronomical calculations are performed by an internal code module.

New for VelaClock 1.1:
- Added more than two hundred cities, including expanded coverage of U.S. cities.
- Added 'UTC (Greenwich)' item. UTC was formerly known as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).
- Improved update performance when activating Dashboard.
- Increased maximum number of cities that can be simultaneously displayed from 16 to 24.
- Simplified installation and registration.

The Dashboard feature in Apple's Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger", offers users a collection of widgets giving them immediate access to information like stock quotes, weather forecasts, airline flight tracking, unit of measure, currency conversions and a phone book. More information is available from Apple's web site: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/.

VelaClock was designed specifically for Tiger users and was built using the Apple Xcode toolset. VelaClock requires Mac OS X "Tiger" version 10.4 or newer.

VelaClock is priced at $9.95 and is available now directly from the Vela Design Group website, at http://www.veladg.com.